


The Wisdom of Earthworms

by Dipnoi



Category: Original Work
Genre: Asexual Character, Asexuality, Autism, F/F, Female Friendship, Gender Dysphoria, Non-binary character, Queerplatonic Relationships
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-06-13
Updated: 2016-12-22
Packaged: 2018-04-04 07:17:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 9,152
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4129449
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dipnoi/pseuds/Dipnoi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Charles Dubois is a quiet, bright boy with a bright future.</p><p>Charlotte Dubois is an unsociable, arrogant girl with a lot to learn.</p><p>Charlie doesn't quite know how to be either of them, never mind both.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

In the examination chamber — a bland, colourless hall in the style of stern, underfunded academia — row after row of boys sat in undersized desks, their heads bowed, their brows furrowed, their hands clenched about pencils and pens. An immense clock watched over the room, it’s stern face, it’s broad hands indicating the eleventh hour — two hours left.

Strange children they were — for what child is so solemn? So faded and grey? With their polished shoes and their uniforms neatly pressed, in their bearing they resembled not so much children as adults in miniature. Such is the power of the entrance exam: to weigh the mind and soul and find so many wanting, to age the spirits of the young well before their time.

The long hand of the grand clock drops and halts, sudden, like a man at the gallows, like the blade of the guillotine. The children pay it no mind, no thought, with no attention to spare but for their paper and pencil, their shoulders curled, their brows furrowed — until one of their number — a gangly youth in the most awkward stage of adolescence, with unevenly cropped hair and prominent wrist-bones at least an inch beyond the cuff of a threadbare beige shirt and ankles entirely exposed alongside bare, bony feet — sat up, stretched, and pushed back the chair. The pad of naked feet against the inlaid rubber of the floor was soft and imperceptible even in the silence of the echoing hall. Long hands laid the small stack of paper neatly on the examiner’s table, and the youth quietly turned for the door.

“Stop!” The examiner hissed, and the adolescent froze like a rabbit beneath the wings of a hawk, shoulders tense. The examiner raised an imperious eyebrow and tapped a single nail against the top paper. “Name, young man.”

“Oh, r-right. Sssorry.” With a shaky nod and after a moment’s hesitation, the teenager wrote with shaking hands a shakier  _ Charles Dubois _ at the top of the paper, nodded again, then left.

  
  


There was a certain prestige to the annual entrance exam — a proving ground for the young academic, a place to sort the men from the boys in terms of intellectual competition. Every year, boys between the ages of fourteen and sixteen sat the exam; each with the hope of earning his place in the highest preparatory academies the country had to offer. Any lad scoring within the top quintile had a bright future in store, a place beside the sons of the wealthiest merchants and the noblest lords. It was a great honour for the chosen few and, of course, for the institutions and educators that produced such bright young minds. That one of the students of the small provincial school of Sussenburry Academy had found himself in the top half-percentile of the entire country would normally be a matter of pride and distinction for the school’s headmaster, the Honorable Dwight Luther.

It was all highly irregular — this was the constant refrain of Luther’s thoughts, a mantra emanating from the highly regular core of his highly regular bones — it was all  _ highly irregular _ , and things that were  _ highly irregular _ were designed to make his simple, well-ordered life  _ unnecessarily difficult. _ He had thought and thought and thought and still couldn’t decide what would be worse for his career, his ambitions, his reputation, his piece of mind : to admit that the brilliant young Charles Dubois did not exist and had never existed or to admit that the brilliant young Charles Dubois was not, as one might assume, a boy named Charles Dubois.

Now, Luther had rarely the occasion to know the troublesome Miss Dubois, though reports from her instructors painted alternate stories of a quiet, bright girl with a love of learning who struggled to connect with her peers and a mute misanthrope too arrogant to teach and too aloof to attract friends. Her file had the odd notes that accumulate in the record of any student over time: enjoys art, needs additional attention in algebra, has stopped wearing shoes, forgot how to speak English for a week, simply disappears during physical education on a regular basis. Undoubtedly, some notes were odder than others.

He learned something about Charlotte Dubois immediately as she and her mother entered his nice, regular office, that thing being that the examiners were perhaps not to blame for this whole irregular mess. While it would be kinder by far to blame the shocking cut of her hair or the unflattering looseness of the school uniform, the truth of the thing was that there was a peculiar ambiguity to her features — not quite a masculinity, but a strange in-between quality — a heaviness to the bones and jaw paired with an undeniable softness, broadening shoulders and a flat chest alongside a shorter stature and roundness to the face and hands. It was a face in great need of context to give meaning and direction to its slippery androgyny — context that its owner entirely failed to give, Miss Dubois being equally epicene in terms of demeanor, watching him back with a frank confidence and unveiled curiosity, but gently acquiescing his request to sit.

_ How terrible a thing, to have so mannish and unattractive a creature for a daughter!  _ Thought Luther, a sweaty, bejowled man with a complexion uncannily similar to that of raw pork.

Her mother sat likewise, with a far more guarded expression, one that suggested his soul was being weighed and that she regretted not having worn gloves for the proceedings.

“You must be Mrs. Dubois, so good to meet you.” He glanced towards the door and gave a faint, nervous laugh. “I don’t suppose your husband is on his way?”

“It is very good, sir.” She smiled tightly. “He isn’t, but you will find I am more than capable of speaking for the both of us. You asked for Charlotte’s parents, and those are my qualifications.”

Mrs. Dubois’ accent, when she spoke, told a story of rural, impoverished roots, humble beginnings written on the stress of every syllable and the shape of every consonant and vowel, but her language revealed a level of literacy enough to fill any sensible member of the upper classes with a pervading emotion of unease, a slick uncertainty that pooled in the abdomen. It was all well and good to suggest the impoverished classes educate themselves to help their station, best done while enjoying a cigar and a digestif after dinner with equally magnanimous men of a similar station, but there was something deeply disquieting when the poor went around improving themselves without a by-your-leave. Most students who remained at the school after a certain age were the children of middle-class businessmen and well-to-do craftsmen - entrepreneurs and artisans all, while the poorer students went to work in the same farms and factories their fathers had as soon as the law would allow it, so it was not often that circumstances obligated him to meet such members of the public.

“Would Charlotte perhaps like to go-”

“This involves her. She stays.”

“Ah, yes. So it does.” He cleared his throat, sighed, then cleared it again. “Yes, well, I’m sure you’ll understand this is all highly irregular. Normally, that protocol was not strictly followed would require an investigation, perhaps some form of academic probation...”

Miss Dubois hunched her shoulders and hung her head. Mrs. Dubois raised her eyebrows in a way that communicated that she found the headmaster’s company to be not entirely unlike finding some long-dead thing smeared across the bottom of one’s shoe or perhaps discovering a large hairy insect preserved in one’s raspberry jam only after one has already spread a healthy spoonful across one’s toast. A pink flush had crept its way up his neck, where the blood settled in his jowls. He resembled nothing more closely than a shaved bulldog with a severe sunburn. He cleared his throat once more.

“However, I, in cooperation with the board, have decided to grant clemency in this area. It is clear to us that it was never your daughter’s intention to cause trouble or bring disrepute to the institution through cheating or any other such behaviour. Beyond the matter of, ah, misrepresentation of personal information on the test and the lack of prerequisites, there’s no evidence of academic dishonesty of any kind.”

“A-and?”

“And, Miss Dubois?”

Charlotte Dubois’ head rose like a marionette’s. “D-did you just w-want to tell us I’m not in trouble? Is that a-all?”

“Of course not, young lady!” Luther caught a reprimand about intruding in adult conversation before it reached the end of his tongue. Mrs. Dubois seemed less inclined to discipline her daughter for breach in etiquette than to hide his corpse somewhere quiet and undisturbed by human activity for the beasts of nature to do with it what they would. “The thing is, you did very well - very well indeed - on the exam, but of course you can both see the problem here.”

“She wants to learn - that shouldn’t be a problem.”

“And it isn’t learning that’s at issue! It’s, why, it’s wonderful that she wants to learn; it’s rather these schools - she would be the only student of her kind there! I can only imagine how lonely that would be! And, well, it really isn’t appropriate for boys and girls to go to school together after a certain age.” He paused, waiting for anticipation to build amongst his audience - uncooperative as they’d proven themselves to be, they merely stared incredulously until he cleared his throat and began. “Well, well - One of the academies in question has a sister school - normally enrollment is, ah, restricted, but they are apparently willing to make an exception…”

“They t-teach mathematics?”

“Why yes-”

“A-and science?”

“Yes-”

“A-and French and Latin and a-all the other things the boys’ school t-teaches?”

“Yes, yes, they teach all those things.” Luther huffed.

Mrs. Dubois pursed her lips. “Yes or no, Charlie.”

Miss Dubois chewed her thumb nail, solemn eyes flicking back and forth, watching some rapid interplay upon the aether neither adult could see, then stilling, pulling the wet thumb from her mouth. “Y-yes.” She inhaled deeply through her nose. “Yes, I want to go.”


	2. Chapter 2

Charlie’s eyes followed the cream-yellow envelope that jutted out of in Mother’s coat pocket like a cat’s eyes follow the tail of a fat mouse. She held Mother’s hand and allowed herself to be pulled along with little concern as to route or destination, but she watched that envelope - it was hers, after all.

“Remember you’ll be away from me - you’ll have paper to write, but if you need me, I won’t be close. You need to be responsible and try to act normal when you’re in public.”

Charlie burbled agreeable nonsense as Mother pulled them into a charity shop, grumbling about school uniforms and ungrateful children who insisted on growing like weeds and being taller than their patient, saintly mothers.

Charity shops are strange places, like the logical opposite of a bucolic clearing filled with fairy rings in the deepest part of an old forest  - each store nearly indistinguishable from all the others with their cheap flooring, over-bright lighting, and the aggressive smell of industrial grade detergent. Some places turn the mind to thoughts of magic, wonder, and mystery, while the banal efficiency of the rows and rows of second hand clothes and books of the charity shop effectively sterilizes imagination in much the same way as bleach sterilizes the battered toys on the shelves along one wall.

Among the forest of dresses and coats, Mother pulled out the letter and unfolded it, lips moving as she scanned the contents. “Looks like we’ll need a few more black skirts and white dress-shirts as well as…” She leaned in and squinted. “A black waistcoat and blue ascot. Heaven knows how anyone learns Maths without a blue ascot.”

Mother buzzed around the store, Charlie in tow, pulling out garments and hmming then either tutting and hanging them back up or nodding and ejecting them violently into Charlie’s face. Barring any obvious direction, Charlie carried them along behind.

“Now, look through them, try them on. Any rips, tears, missing buttons, we leave ‘em. Too tight, too loose, we leave ‘em. You’ll be wearing these every day, and there’s no point being uncomfortable.”

“These are for me?”

“Yes, dummy, they won’t fit me, will they? Why did you think we were here?”

Charlie pouted. “M’not stupid.”

“Didn’t call you stupid, dummy.” Mother stuck her tongue out and Charlie stuck her own tongue right back. “Your boots and coat are good, but you’ll need a pair of dress shoes as well.”

“...Can I pick?”

Mother shrugged. “Do what you want. They just have to be leather and reasonably formal. Fancy bits of dead cow. Moo.”

Charlie gave a far more realistic moo in response - she had once met a large brown dairy cow while cutting through a farmer’s field - and wandered into the shoe section, arms wrapped around the small pile of skirts and shirts. Her feet brought her past row upon row of pumps and sandals and flats and mules, before her breath stopped and her eyes grew big and round as pigeon eggs. “Oh.”

“Those ones?”

“Yeah.” It came out breathy and low. The object of her awe was a pair of handsome derbies with capped, unadorned toes and made from smooth pieces of sturdy leather - or a material that was very like. The stitching was strong and tidy and the soles only lightly scuffed and the aglets laced with good, unfrayed cord. Best of all was the colour - nothing so staid and overdone as the usual black or brown, but a deep, demure maroon - a dark red hue both subtle and subtly daring.

It is here one must make explanation of the mind and habits of one Charlotte Dubois. Most pertinent is that, despite the anxiety of her instructors and relatives and every other adult whose interests intersected with her young life to blame any and all overt signs of a notable lack of proper femininity on anything but some form of innate inclination, she came by her odd preoccupation with masculine fashion quite honestly. They blamed her intelligence, her ambition, her life as an only child - they opined that it was all a developmental stage, a natural, but ultimately limited tomboy phase that her mother had allowed to continue - encouraged, really - far longer than she should, and once it passed dear Charlotte’s inherent femininity would come to the surface.

They were quite right of course that it was, indeed, a phase. An extremely long, persistent phase which had nothing to do with a pattern of transitory developmental stages and everything to do with the permanent result of a lifelong process of nature augmented by nurture - otherwise known as a personality.

“Try them on then, dummy.”

Charlie cocked her head to one side and squinted, but quickly decided that there was nothing obviously funny about tricking her into trying on shoes, so Mother probably wasn’t teasing. Probably.

She handed the bundle of clothes to Mother and slipped off the battered sneakers whose soles had already worn thin and slipped into the pretty derbies with a faintly reverent air and laced them with fingers clumsy with excitement and also just plain clumsy. They fit - neither too loose, nor too tight with the right amount of space in the toe. She gave a happy little grunt.

Charlie insisted on wearing The Shoes with every outfit she tried on and at the checkout and on the walk home, chirping and humming and wiggling her fingers and toes all the way. “Can I wear them tomorrow?

“Yes.”

“And when we visit Auntie?”

“Yes, you can do whatever you want.”

“And on Sunday?”

“Go right ahead.” Mother snorted. “Do you want to sleep with them on tonight as well?”

“I hadn’t thought about it, though I… was that sarcasm?”

“What do you think?”

“I think that that was sarcasm.”

“Oh no, not at all.”

“Was that also sarcasm?”

“Would I do that to you?”

“Yes.”

 

Time moved oddly in the short months between that day and the beginning of classes at the new school - that is to say, the laws of the universe that govern time and space operated in much the same manner they usually do and the months were the same length on the calendar they were every year and the days they contained were all the same regular, predictable segments, but on the subjective level, the personal level, there seemed to be too little time and too much time all at once - like rushing rapids overlaid on a meandering stream. It was, in simpler terms, a great deal of hurry-up-and-wait, a fevered rush to prepare interrupted by long stretches of nothing much. One must register, collect supplies, notify past institutions, and otherwise make ready, and there is so little time to do so. However, if one is efficient, then no matter the small window of time, the work is quickly done and that fraction of time seems so much longer than it did when one’s to-do list was as long as one’s arm. The reverse phenomenon, as is common in the case of procrastination, is the far more distressing of the two, but an excess of hours spent in anticipation does wear.

Charlie spent her days in the usual manner of little self-set projects: re-reading texts and books from her small, battered collection; sketching the fine bones and soft feathers of a small bird found dead near one of the windows before giving it a proper burial in the back garden; and, on Mother’s insistence, writing letters to various relatives and friends of the family with news of her acceptance, scrawling them first in her notebook, then copying them onto finer paper in a more elegant hand.

Charlie disliked this last task, not out of any disdain for writing letters or contacting relatives, though if that were the case, what good soul would find fault? That being said, as an avid journaler, she had no small fondness for the activity of writing and even a flair for description which alleviated the boredom of the more tedious retellings, but after only a few letters she developed a persistent ache in her left hand, which shook terribly after the first hour, turning her already untidy scratchings into an illegible mess. Continuing with the right hand was much slower, certainly, and the horrible cramps much quicker in their arrival, but it gave the left a much-needed break.

Mother knocked and entered at around the third hour (or perhaps the fifth, she did lose track of these things) and leant against the door jamb. “You don’t have to finish it all tonight, you know.”

“I know.” Charlie carefully crossed a pair of t’s, pencil moving in short, smooth strokes. “I want to go exploring tomorrow, and I might not get any done if it takes most of the day.”

“Do you want me to make you a lunch?”

“It would be nice if you did.”

“And you would forget to eat if I didn’t.” Mother turned to leave, then hesitated. “Are there any friends you want to visit?”

“Hmm. No.”

“None?”

“None that come to mind. Can we visit Mrs. Nichols at the library? I’ll need to tell her not to expect me on Thursdays anymore.”

“We can do that tomorrow first thing in the morning if that doesn’t disrupt your plans.”

“Yes, let's.”

Mother nodded.

Charlie, assuming dismissal, returned to the paper in front of her, a letter to a much older but much cherished cousin. It tooks about two paragraphs to realize that Mother was still there, watching her with a far-off expression. Charlie looked up and gave her a questioning glance.

“Are you lonely, Charlie?”

“No.”

“No?”

“Not at all.”

Mother sighed. “Sometimes I wonder if we should have had more kids after you.”

Charlie’s eyebrows met, deeply out of depth as she was with this conversation. “I’m fine.”

“I know. I know. Try to make some friends there, won’t you?”

“I will. I promise.” Charlie scowled doubtfully at the prospect.

If Charlie did wish for friends or siblings, it was mostly a wish for access to cast-off jackets and hand-me-down trousers to alter for her own purposes and add to her small collection. She had no real understanding of the attraction of peer relationships - she had observed friendship and verified such social behaviour as extant phenomena, but the only person of her own age with whom she had anything more than the barest of cordial relations was a shy, singularly boring girl by an equally boring name Charlie could never quite recall who likely associated with Charlie purely for the sake of her grade in Latin.

Charlie had no intention of leaving her hard-won treasures behind - her thin dress-shirts, too-short trousers, second-hand shoes, and plain but well-looking ties and suspenders secreted in the bottom of her valise, hidden beneath a healthy layer of socks and skirts. She knew enough to hide them, for though she had Mother's dry tolerance, there had always been raised eyebrows and talk of doctors and psychiatrists - and worse yet, pastors and priests. Far from harboring a dislike of medicine or religion, she saw the attention of the former as properly belonging to the ill and the attention of the latter as properly belonging to the lost. She was neither.

When the day came, Mother saw her off with a hug and a kiss and a reminder to write and yet another hug while father waited in the drive to take her to the station. Charlie took care to remember the way Mother held her, to memorize the strength of her arms and the soft skin into which she pressed her nose at the crook of Mother’s neck where it became the slope of her shoulder. She knew it as well as she knew the smell of dust or the taste of summer raspberries - a sensation she had known since before her earliest memories and ached with strange, unplaceable emotion to leave. Father’s own contribution to the farewell was a near-silent walk to the station, the air thin with cold and quiet so long before even the morning work commute. Only their faint footsteps against the poured stone of the walkway broke through the oppression of twilight. They spoke a little at the station itself while awaiting the coming train - though before boarding he ruffled Charlie’s hair and pulled her into a tight hug of his own.

Charlie both liked and disliked the train - precisely, she liked it far more in theory than in practice. The combination of moving parts - rods, pistons, and engines - required to propel the massive bulk of the train by steam alone was a fascination, but the reality of crowded, noisy, smelly train cars - the sour-sweat and shouts and press of unwashed and irritated passengers, the thunder of those same rods, pistons, and engines, the thin walls and cramped, overfull compartments. The soot that found its way into everything, liberally coating walls, windows, and clothes while filling the air, the eyes, and the lungs.

She holed-up in one of the last cars in the train and crawled under the forward-facing seat alongside her valise. Soon after, several sets of legs entered - two sets of grey trousers and brown brogue oxfords and two sets of stockings and black vinyl flats below the curtains of long, sensible traveling skirts. The bottom of the seat sank measurably closer as the two women sat, skirts blocking what thin light filtered through the small window on the outside wall of the compartment. Their voices are soft, but they reach her quite clearly, even over the thunder of the wheels as the engine pulls against the moorings of its own weight and leaves the station.

She did not particularly understand the conversation between her unknowing fellow passengers, but that was nothing new. It was all a cheerful back and forth - a play of low and high voices. Occasionally, one of the voices will darken - a knowing, insinuating tone, and the others will raise in laughter. Charlie found little amusement in their discussion. It was mostly ‘gossip,’ a catch-all term her aunts used to describe conversations that much like the knitted doilies that covered every conceivable surface in their homes were composed more of air than of substance, often with concealing words like Indisposed, Tired, and Away instead of what they really meant, Pregnant, Drunk, and Arrested, as if passing word of the mayor’s indisposed daughter or the baker’s son who’s away somehow absolved them of the sin of schadenfreude.

Shortly after Charlie’s fourteenth birthday, just a few month past, one of her older cousins took her aside to have a chat, ‘woman-to-woman.’

“So… Charlotte. You’re getting older now… really blossoming into a lady, and I wanted to let you know if you have any questions, you can ask me.”

“No, thank you.” She said, perhaps more bluntly than necessary. The cousin in question was one with which she occasionally shared oxygen at annual family events but only a few, confused genes and not a single previous conversation of any depth, meaning that, should Charlie decide to blossom into anything other than a pedantic misanthrope prone to outbreaks of acne, she would be the last person to which Charlie would even think to turn.

“You don’t have to be shy! I know you must be getting interested in boys…” The trailed insinuation is perhaps Charlie’s least favourite punctuation. “It must be hard to talk about those kinds of things with your mother.”

“I’m really not, and it really isn’t.”

“Oh, maybe not now, but I remember when I was your age… You’ll be just as boy crazy as the next girl soon enough.”

And Charlie knew that her cousin’s husband, the man she fell in love with as a starry-eyed sixteen year-old, was in the bottle (a drunk) and a hard man (an abuser) and went away (to prison) for nearly killing her years before (and some stains no gentle words can hide.) Charlie didn’t want to be cruel, never wanted to cause her pushy and overfamiliar cousin pain, but as always, cruelty was in her nature, was in the bones of her hands and fell from her mouth like acid. “If I ever did wish for advice on romantic matters, why would I ask you?”

The memory was an unpleasant one, and her chest felt heavy, overfull. She wondered if it might be the fried potatoes she ate for breakfast. She rubs at her sternum with the heel of her hand. The arms and face of her little brass pocket-watch had indicated when she was on the platform that there were fourteen hours between the departure of the train and Dryden station where she would disembark, so she pillowed head upon her folded arms and began to doze.

Of course, the anxiety of the trip had disrupted her sleep substantially over the last few days, her final night at home only involving a few scattered and sporadic hours of rest, the doze deepens quickly into a long, heavy sleep.  This means that when she finally awakened, hours later, she was clumsy and slow with lethargy and the sun had long hidden behind the foothills along the horizon. She fishes around in her pocket for her watch, then brings it out to squint at the occluded face - they usually came with glow-in-dark paint on the arms and the numbers, but Mother had vetoed any such thing on the grounds that the paint was more than likely radioactive, which was more than likely correct. Charlie’s eyes had always done well in the dark, however, so it was the concentration of a moment to read the dark numbers. Her heart stuttered in her chest - only twenty minutes until her stop - before stabilizing at a more regular, if also faster rhythm.

The sound of life within the compartment had quieted from the energetic conversation of before to the low murmur of shifting limbs, the near-imperceptible whisper of breathing. There was even soft, sporadic snoring from directly above - at least one is sleeping, sitting up. Charlie needed to rise, needed to leave, but her path was blocked as yet, veiled by the light floral cotton of summer skirts. She checked her watch once more - only fifteen minutes now - and her own breathing became laboured with anxiety.

The foot nearest to her face slides slowly along the floor, presenting a delicate ankle encased in a pristine white stocking. Charlie’s eyes fixed upon it. The answer to the situation was obvious, but unappealing. Ten minutes left, and no other option had presented itself. She had no choice but to act.

One hand snapped out, wrapping around the ankle - and the screaming began.

She let go as the young lady in question stumbled forward and fell, thrashing and flailing, into the laps of the gentlemen sitting across, whose own shouts and screams rose in harmony, and as the other young woman jumped up to stand upon her seat, Charlie grabbed her valise and bolted - up and out of the compartment, through the door and down the hall, followed by thumps and squeals and shrieks. She quickly made the distance of half the car, then slowed to a brisk walk, face as blank and unperturbed as a frozen pool, just as a harried conductor arrived to investigate the commotion.

He passed her without a second glance.

Charlie continued through the next four compartments, eyes ahead and expression controlled, movements confident and unhurried if stiff, as her pulse hammered in her throat. Her nostrils flared to fill her stressed lungs in the most inconspicuous manner possible until she calmed her breathing. When the train pulled into the station, she stepped onto the platform, entirely composed.

It was late, dark, and most of the thin crowd that shared the station came from the very train from which she departed. Many were child-parent sets - a mother or father or both alongside a girl of approximately her own age. She payed them particular attention: watching their movements, listening to their conversations, and following them, subtly, casually - though the truth is that human beings, that soft bourgeois such as these, pay little attention to their surroundings, especially in  a crowd. They have little fear, little vigilance - having spent most of their lives at the top of the metaphorical food chain as well as the literal one, they have never needed to develop the fear of prey. Isolation makes most of mankind more cautious, but even then, they are easy enough to follow unnoticed.

Charlie noted the general direction of the crowd and singled out a likely mother-daughter pair. The daughter wore a pretty linen dress - pale pink and yellow, light and flowing in the late-summer heat. She chattered happy nonsense to her inattentive mother, who merely nodded and hummed at appropriate intervals. They shared a strong resemblance - auburn hair in loose curls, a little button nose dotted with freckles. Their faces were striking, petite and fine-boned. Fascinating in their ever-so-slightly imperfect symmetry, in their common yet divergent features. Charlie observed them carefully as she followed, knowing that she likely would not recognize them, should she ever see them again. Faces… tended to fade. Fine and gossamer as spider’s silk, as a confused dream - and forgotten just as quickly. People she met slipped from her mind with uncomfortable ease, and she was never quite sure why.

The world outside the station was dark - not night, but the prolonged twilight of summer in the upper northern hemisphere. The air was thick with the buzz of electric lights and the wingbeats of the insects that spun about them. The girl and her mother stepped into a waiting trolley, joining around twenty other familial sets. Charlie watched, waited until the last moment, when the trolley conductor pulled a long lever to release the brake, then passed behind the trolley as if to cross the street, before hopping onto the bumper and pulling her valise up behind her. Using the window ledge to pull and push herself upwards, she clambered awkwardly with her three available limbs onto the roof. Atop the trolley, she sat heavily and exhaled. A young man on the sidewalk was staring. She made hard eye-contact and raised an eyebrow - he looked away.

She lay flat against the metal roof reducing wind resistance as the trolley began to pick up speed. The metal was warm from the heat of the day, even as the air temperature dropped with the snuffing of the faint light from over the horizon and as the trolley left the sun-baked streets of the little rural hamlet that housed the station behind for the cooler air of the shaded, well-rutted roads of the wooded countryside. With darkness came the buzz of insects both bloodsucking and benign, and the load croak of distant frogs carried on the wind. With the cold came a sporadic, full-body shiver, for all that she felt quite warm, a consequence, perhaps, of having not eaten since the night before. As well, the hair of her arms rose with a sensation alarmingly like spiders tap-dancing across her skin.

Despite this mild discomfort and a day spent sleeping, however, she began to feel so very sleepy. A constant, if exhaustion-subdued, conversational hum came muffled through the metal beneath her ear, and its soothing drone made her drowsy. She dozed, as much as is possible while lying untethered atop a trolley moving at speed down a bumpy country road, wishing neither to fall nor to lose one’s luggage. A particularly rough patch kept her eyes open for a while, primarily through a roiling queasiness, and in a moment of dozy curiosity, she poked her head over the edge to watch the grass at the side of the road whip by.

If she were to fall, to jump, to throw herself bodily from the trolley at this height and speed, it would undoubtedly result in injury, anywhere from mild to severe, anything from cuts and bruises to ruptured organs and broken bones. If she were to hit the ground running, or rolling at the very least, she might avoid the worst of it, though the rough, packed gravel and dirt would take its (quite nearly literal) pound of flesh. She mused dispassionately for several minutes on her own hypothetical broken body, before the road smoothed and straightened, and she closed her eyes again, to soothe the nausea of movement.

They snapped open when the trolley slowed significantly, trading hard dirt and thick trees for cobblestone, soft loam, and carefully groomed shrubbery. Ahead, a great long building of red brick reclined across a shallow hill, facade lit pleasantly by tall lampposts and what light filtered out through the tall, shuttered windows. Charlie curled onto her side, positioning both feet against the valise and launching it onto the lawn with a coordinated kick, then lifted herself into a crouch and leapt after it, rolling into the bushes like a gunfighter, head tucked and eyes clenched tight against the scratching brambles.

She pulled herself along with her elbows, dragging her stomach through the soft, damp grass as the trolley trundled up to stop in front of the building. She quickly crawled across the manicured lawn, then rose slowly onto her hands and knees behind the raised base of one of those pretentious modern fountain sculptures of naked winged-babies that steal wholesale from the work of great renaissance artists who themselves cribbed heavily from the classical Greeks. Hidden by the dark and the busy, tired lack of interest of the girls and the various combinations of parents, nannies, and general keepers who streamed from the trolley to mill about the driveway. The grand doors to swing wide, revealing a tall, stately giantess of a woman who made a stark shadow in the golden light of the interiour of the academy, who greeted the assembled in a voice somehow both fluty and booming, like a kettle at boil.

Charlie, entirely uninterested in this turn of events, took advantage of the distraction to make a stooped run along the thick hedge, then, once she was far enough from the light, to briefly risk open ground - darting from the cover of the hedge, propelling herself up a low outer wall through her momentum, and lunging into a dark first-story window. She landed, abdomen on the sill with the soft, involuntary grunt of one who has just had all the air in their body suddenly and unexpectedly forced out through their nose. She wriggled, legs flailing wildly, until she fell inside, gasping like a landed fish and clutching her diaphragm.

It becomes necessary to acknowledge the elephant in the room - the metaphorical pachyderm in the metaphorical drawing room who has eaten all of the metaphorical treats and biscuits, leaving none for anyone else, and has rested its great dusty metaphorical elephantine feet on the metaphorical coffee table without so much as a by-your-leave, as the metaphorical hostess white-knuckles one of the nicer pieces of china and makes tense metaphorical small talk with the confused metaphorical guests. Our particular example of hypothetical large terrestrial trunked mammal in an inappropriate domestic setting is best explained by a series of incidents which took place during our young protagonist’s childhood.

It all started with a Christmas party - more specifically, with the cumulative trauma of nine years of Christmases, Thanksgivings, and Easters which had finally come to a crisis - when, after two and a half hours of ‘good natured’ cajoling and teasing by several near-strangers who by the vagaries of genetics were nevertheless ‘family’, ten year-old Charlotte had quietly stood after a ‘friendly’ kick from a older cousin once-removed and had left the room to a chorus of “Come on, don’t be like that!” and “We were only kidding!” Charlie curled up in the bottom of an out-of-the-way linen cupboard and cried silently until Mother found her.

Mother sat on the floor outside the door, legs curled beneath her. “What are you doing?”

“...”

“Are you a sheet?”

“Nnnh.”

“Are you a dishcloth?”

“Nnnh.”

“Tablecloth?”

“Nnnh.”

“Towel?”

Charlie sniffed. “N-n-not sufficiently absorbent.”

“What are you doing in there, then?”

Mother was trying to make her laugh, an underhanded tactic, but effective despite Charlie’s best efforts not to smile. “Being sad.”

“You don’t look sad.” Mother smiled. Charlie couldn’t quite look at her face, that was one of the first things to malfunction when she became upset, but her voice sounded like a smile, the timbre altered just so by the shape of her mouth. Charlie’s eyes itched and her cheeks were warm and likely splotchy, so she suspected that Mother’s statement was not entirely accurate, but her general tendency towards aggressive pedantry could be on occasion subsumed by the deference she granted the few authority figures that she recognized as such. “I told them you don’t like being touched. They won’t do it again if you come back.”

Charlie curled up tighter, squeezing her bony knees against her chest with her skinny arms. “No.”

“...Are you sure you can’t come back?”

Charlie’s breathing grew heavy and fast and she blinked rapidly.

“No, no. Hey, I won’t make you if you don’t want to. No more of that, alright?” Mother reached out and tapped one of Charlie’s hands. Charlie released her knee and Mother took the hand and held it, stroked her thumb down the back. “...Would it help to pretend, do you think?”

Charlie tilted her head. She understood pretend. They pretended all the time, she and Mother. They pretended to be characters in books and talked about how the different characters all behaved differently because they had different thoughts and feelings; they pretended to be very, very deaf when grandmother started talking about natives again; and they pretended to be birds (quiet, quiet birds) in the backyard when Mother was too tired right now, Charlie, and needed to rest. Her art teacher bemoaned her irredeemable lack of imagination, but she understood pretend very well.

“Charlie doesn’t want to go out and talk to people right now, because she’s sad and doesn’t like when people tease, right?”

Charlie wiped her nose with her forearm, which came back shiny with mucus.

“Gross.”

Charlie giggled.

“If Charlie can’t come out right now, why don’t you try being someone else for a little while? Someone who can?”

Charlie hesitated, then nodded.

Mother cajoled and coaxed Charlie out of the linen cupboard, then brought her to the washroom, where she wetted two cloths with cold water - one she gave to Charlie to hold against her tear-swollen eyes, the other she used to wipe Charlie’s hands, face, and the streak of snot down one arm. All the while she talked about thieves and lawyers and diplomats and spies - Charlie could be a spy, couldn’t she? Just like in the books, the cheap pulp novels - she could be smooth and suave and never let on how nervous she was, because that would threaten the mission, because that was a secret, that was Charlotte, not Codename Wednesday (Mother let her pick her own codename) who was wily and debonaire and not afraid of anything.

After, Charlie returned to the dining room, smiled politely when necessary, answered when questioned, spoke when spoken to, and completed her very own Top Secret Mission by surreptitiously hiding walnuts all throughout the house, in increasingly odder places, including on her cousins’ persons - their pockets, their hats, their belongings, gradually and entirely without their knowledge filled with nuts. She remained placid and calm, even cheerful, for the rest of the evening.

From then on, whenever they practiced, prepared for a social occasion, Mother would talk her through… scenarios, characters, masks for her to take on and off as the situation called for it; she would even encourage Charlie to create personas of her own. So she did - she populated her imagination, her social repertoire, with knights and politicians and monarchs - with people like and unlike herself - but that particular personality, that singular image of spy, stayed with her and took on a life of its own.

What is a spy, after all? An outsider, an intruder unrecognized, unnoticed. And what is the fantasy of the lonely and unwanted outlier, the misbegotten souls born strangers to their own families and communities, if not to walk unnoticed, unquestioned, accepted? Not necessarily a wish for sameness, for normalcy, but for a true place in the only world they have ever known.

This is why, when anxious, when stressed, when as far outside her element as a teacup floating among the debris that forms the great rings of Saturn, she retreated into that other self, that self-assured doppelganger, trading the obvious, unavoidably strange of herself for the covertly, invisibly so.

As for why this led to Charlie Dubois stunned and winded on the floor of a strange dark room... Well, one might say that her former art teacher’s comment on her irredeemable lack of imagination was at once incredibly perceptive as well as completely incorrect. When it came to the real and the imagined, there was always a degree of… blurring between the two - not through a lack of understanding of the difference, but through an intense dedication to a vivid fiction.

After several long moments to regain control of her diaphragm and steady her breathing, Charlie sat up in what was, quite fortunately, an empty, moonlit classroom. Rows of neat, orderly chairs behind neat, orderly desks, before a well-used chalkboard still faintly dusty from words written and lessons learned. She rolled to her feet and stepped up to the board, picked up a piece of chalk - pausing to consider the impulse to stick it in her mouth and bite down to test the taste and consistency, but deciding against it - and wrote in small, untidy letters, ‘Je dévorerai le soleil et vous donnerai la nuit éternelle.’ Then, after a moment’s thought, she dotted the i’s with tiny misshapen hearts, like she had seen girls in her classes who practiced writing their names do.

She leaned back to admire her work - and there, from the edge of her perception, she heard the murmur of voices and the creak of an elderly wooden floor under stress somewhere beyond the classroom door. She went limp, like a ragdoll, and fell flat against the floor, minimizing visibility through the glass pane set in the door and the recognizability of her silhouette, as well as making use of the eddy of shadow the teacher’s desk created against the stream of moonlight and setting up the excuse of a fainting spell should she be discovered.

A tight, bright feeling welled in her chest as the light of a lamp and a troupe of long shadows passed by without discovering her hiding place. Most of the chattering voices were high and young, and a lower, older voice spoke over them all, about dormitories and curfews and wake-up calls, which moved up and away, meaning there were stairs just to the right outside the door. Charlie, of course, had no plan to follow. The moon was full, and that is no time for a secret agent to sleep. 


	3. Chapter 3

The vast majority of humanity, with the exception of certain classes of service worker and socialite, naturally fall into a diurnal pattern of existence — that is to say that their lives follow the natural lifespan of the solar day, bracketed by the rise and fall of the sun. Their productive day takes place beneath the face of that life-giving, life-taking proximate star, their actions ever at the whim of its benevolence, its light. Some, however, are out of synch with their brethren — they live, without deciding, without wishing, in those little seen, little walked spaces, those hours devoted to dreaming. The insomniac is entirely unlike the somnambulist, the sleepwalker, but they share an involuntary nocturnal activity — one acting without awareness, the other aware without choosing.

Charlie was not a classic insomniac, not one of those poor souls whose nervous energy keeps them up and aware, hypervigilant, long past the point of exhaustion. Rather, like an owl or bat or many-eyed creeping thing of the night, she was overcome with seemingly boundless energy at the fall of dusk, while finding herself lethargic and dozy by day — an issue exacerbated by “a lifelong love of learning”, a cruel, incurable condition characterized by an excessive interest in the written word, including reading well past one’s proper bedtime, and spread through prolonged exposure to literature. It is, of course, invariably lethal, in the sense that everyone who has it does eventually die.

This is all to say that during her nighttime wanderings the evening of her arrival at Joutel Preparatory, Charlotte found the school library in much the way that an iron filing finds a lodestone. She had something of a knack for ferreting out large stockpiles of books, perhaps indicating some kind of highly specific paranormal sixth-sense. Though, if one suggested as much to the girl in question, she would likely reply that if a paranormal phenomenon were to observably exist, it would by definition not be paranormal, merely “normal”. This was exactly kind of thinking that made Charlie one of the brightest pupils of her year as well as deeply, deeply unpopular.

It was neither the biggest nor the grandest library Charlie had ever seen, but the deep shadows that clung to the walls and shied away from the sharp moonbeams that cut through the night lent a sense of unknown, unseen space. The gentle heel-toe step that led her to the tall, austere shelves packed with heavy, serious books disturbed not a mote of dust. She ran a narrow bony finger down the, unfortunately blank, spine of a dour tome and absently wondered where the card catalogue might be. 

Another book, a ratty old thing with a soft cover of a truly unfortunate shade of yellow, which had been bent awkwardly to fit in a shelf packed with far more robust volumes. After gently working the poor thing out of the crammed row, she read the title:  _ A Field Guide to the Edible and Medicinal Plant Species of North America, 5th edition.  _ Well, that seemed decent enough, at least to start. 

Charlie brought the misshapen book with her to the nearest armchair — a squat, fat thing near one of the tall, narrow windows, sat, and began to read about the many wondrous purposes of  _ Typha latifolia _ , the common cattail. The list included, among other things, an impromptu food, shelter, and even antiseptic salve, if the  _ Field Guide _ ’s author, a Dr. Hermann Holtzrose, who certainly sounded like an expert, was to be believed. With a name like that, he might even have a few medicinal properties himself, given proper preparation.

She remained there, curled up, legs tucked under herself, as she read through the book entire, cover to cover — and then another and another until a small stack sat on the small table at her elbow. There was no obvious pattern, no clear theme:  _ A Study in Scarlet _ ,  _ A Beginner’s Guide to Paper Folding _ , and  _ Rights of Man _ followed by  _ Sense and Sensibility _ ,  _ The World of Automation _ , and  _ The Anatomy of Terrestrial Invertebrates vol. 3.  _ She had managed about 4/5ths of  _ Terrestrial Invertebrates _ when she realized, quite suddenly, that she was no longer reading by moonlight, but by the weak wash of the sun peaking over the horizon. 

She gave a little sigh and stood, mostly successfully, though her sitting position had cut off some of the circulation to her right leg, causing her to limp heavily. She collected the books and, dragging a foot that was at once numb enough that it didn’t quite seem to belong to her anymore and alive with buzzing, unreal pins of pain, returned them one by one to their habitual places. She was still holding  _ Terrestrial Invertebrates _ when she heard the footsteps out in the hall, ears twitching back as much like a cat’s as the limited range of the musculature of the human skull would allow. Accordingly, she ducked behind one of the standing shelves.

Unsurprisingly, if unluckily, a woman — or at the very least a pair of click-clacking heels presumably attached to a person who had no objection to wearing women’s clothing in a professional environment — entered the library. A glance through a gap in the books confirmed it to be a woman dressed head to toe in gray.

Something happened when Charlie tried to look at the woman directly, something strange. A dizzy nausea and a buzzing in her skull and jaw like the prelude to a migraine. She watched her instead through the corner of her eye, the fuzzy, unfocused periphery of her vision. The woman, the gray lady, is tall with a charcoal cardigan, an ashen complexion, and silver hair held back in a tight bun at the nape of her neck — further detail beyond the capacity of this particular part of her visual field. 

As the woman walked further and further into the library, Charlie moved towards the door, keeping the shelf between her and the grey lady, swift and silent — which is no small feat when one’s leg feels as if it simply ends around mid-calf and the rest is so much dead meat. Her back twinged sympathetically when Charlie dropped into a stoop to cross the gap between shelves. At the very end of the row, nearest to the door, she apologetically set  _ Terrestrial Invertebrates _ where it will be easily spotted beside a large set of fat, pompous dictionaries, checked to ensure the grey lady was turned away, and darted out the door.

Charlie limps a ways down the hall before pausing to regain her bearings. She hasn’t been followed — she’s calm, unperturbed, but for some reason her hands are shaking — and the echoes of footsteps and adolescent voices drift faintly from up ahead. She made a beeline for the sound and stepped in behind a loose group of girls in uniforms just like hers all headed in the same direction. Charlie sniffed the air.  _ Ah. Food. _

Charlie was not, as a rule, fond of food. She was fond of nice tastes, of continuing to exist, of  _ not starving to death _ , but she found the routine necessity of eating to be more than a little tedious. If she could simply eat what she chose, when she chose, she would be far warmer to the whole idea. As is, she was forced, through stupid inconvenient _ biology, _ to eat Every. Single. Day. Sometimes multiple times in just one day! It was all a terribly inconvenient affair. She took most meals with a pragmatic efficiency, at least when she didn’t forget, simply because it made her feel terribly ill when she did not.

Even if this were not the case, the food provided in the long narrow hall with its long narrow tables would have provided some challenge. The carrots were pale with overboiling, the scrambled eggs of a consistency similar to that of damp bread, and the potatoes — well, those were potatoes weren’t they…? In the end, Charlie settled for half a plate of peas, just peas, which at the very least had approximately the right colour and almost the right texture. It is the best choice, the only choice, given the circumstances.

The girl who sat across from her — for all that Charlie chose this corner of the room precisely because it was utterly deserted — seemed to disagree. She is blonde and bright pink and has a petite nose that turns up sharply at the end, like a pig’s — a description Charlie immediately flags as ‘socially inappropriate’. “Um, is that all you’re eating?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t want any sausages?”

“No.”

“You’re not gonna have any eggs?”

“Just so.”

The girl scrunched up her piggy nose. “What does that mean?”

“It means, ‘Indeed, I do not intend to partake of the eggs.’ At least in this context.”

Her nose, if anything, became even more scrunched and piggy. “Why do you use so many big words?”

“...is ‘partake’ a big word?”

The nose reaches new heights of scrunched and climbs to the very summit of piggy. “Well, no, maybe not all that big, but people don’t use b— weird words like that.”

“Don’t they? Why are they words like that if no one uses them? Mustn’t someone say the odd ‘partake’ or ‘forsooth’? They wouldn’t exist otherwise, would they?”

“Um, I don’t know?” She looked a very distressed piggy indeed, face blotchy and pink. An awkward silence followed.

Charlie, a little disappointed, mostly managed to suppress the frown that wanted to twist her mouth. _Oh goody._ She had upset someone already.  She tried to think of something to talk about — to be friendly, to demonstrate willing — and she eventually settled on the other girl’s plate. She brightened and leant forward. “Do you know what's fun about sausages?”


End file.
